


And Then There Are Also Reasons

by KinoGlowWorm



Series: Transference [4]
Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Breakfast, Coming Out Sensate, Flashbacks, Gen, POV Shiro, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 13:17:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4921090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KinoGlowWorm/pseuds/KinoGlowWorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Maybe I explained this in the wrong order,” Capheus interrupted, his eyes searching the room for any place else to rest before returning. “Let me tell you how, and then I can tell you about her. Only, I can’t fully explain how except to tell you what has been happening.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Then There Are Also Reasons

Shiro’s son stared across his morning tea like he was focused on a tiny bird a hundred miles away. She had grown used to it the last few weeks. It still placed a stone in her heart every time.

She turned back to washing up the breakfast dishes as the buttery light of early morning spread long shadows into the room. Placing the last plate on the cloth to dry and wiping her hands, she returned to the small table. She set her still damp hand lightly on his arm. The grooves in his forehead melted smooth as his attention re-entered room to attend to her.

Setting his mug gently on the table, he placed his other hand on top of hers where it rested and settled his lips in a soft smile.

“There is something I must tell you, mother, but I am strangely out of words to explain,” he said, his forehead rising into a crease once more.

“We have a guest coming to visit,” he said. “I do not know for how long.”

She considered this, wondering whom he could mean. Their lines with family outside the city had been slack for over a decade now, and the friends they had in Nairobi all lived within walking distance.

“Her family has been having a lot of trouble and it is no longer safe for her at home,” he continued.

 _Her_ , Shiro’s head tilted slightly. Capheus hadn’t so much as mentioned any girls since Jela had tried to drag him out to dances as a teenager. He had never idolized the lovers in the movies he spent so much time in as he did the warriors, the protectors.

“Who is she? Is she from the neighborhood?” she asked, still trying to line the fabric of this story up with what she knew of the man her son had grown to be. He was not the kind to keep secrets - indeed, there were only so many secrets one could keep in a neighborhood like this - and yet this was the first she heard of this.

“No, she’s not from nearby. That brings me back to the thing I don’t know how to explain.” He paused and looked down, his hands fiddling with his teacup again. “She is from Korea.”

“But how could...” Shiro began, trying to reach threads from their kitchen table across the distance eastwards.

“Maybe I explained this in the wrong order,” he interrupted, his eyes searching the room for any place else to rest before returning. “Let me tell you how, and then I can tell you about her. Only, I can’t fully explain how except to tell you what has been happening.” He shifted in his seat and leaned towards her over the table, his hands clasping around hers. This time, it made her more nervous than comforted.

“Do you remember when I had all of those terrible headaches several weeks ago?” he asked, and her stomach sank and twisted as she immediately recalled those turbulent few days.

“Yes, of course. It was when you started having trouble with those men.”

“I suppose it was, but that was a coincidence. Mostly,” He paused, as if trying to untangle a riddle just posed. “Anyway, the headaches - and the trouble - were not the only things that began then. This may sound unbelievable, but I also began to see and hear people from far away. They began to visit me here, throughout the day. I also began to visit them: I visited Chicago on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks, I rode on a plane to Iceland and looked down at the clouds, I had tea in London. But I also never left Nairobi. I still do not know how or why, just that it is.”

Capheus had always lived in his head to some degree. He had been gifted with his father’s rich imagination, and was often caught in the interplay between the stories he absorbed, the stories he created, and the world in front of him.

Back home, there had been people who claimed that spirits visited them in their dreams from time to time, but never like this. The connection there was rooted in the land or in the blood, though for their purposes they might as well have been the same thing. Those visitors always seemed to lead more deeply into the spirit of the place, for better or worse. Shiro had long held these stories an arm’s length from her for much that reason: too often they seemed to guide people to insulate themselves from the larger world. Capheus’s visitors seemed to be guiding him everywhere else.

Shiro felt more than ever like she was pushing through dense leaves to see through to him, much less to catch a glimpse of what it was he saw there. But what he was describing was her dream, carried within him whether he knew it or not.

“I remember the first time I saw a map of the world I was eight years old. It was my first day of school. That first day, Teacher Asa stuck a pin in the map where we were and then another pin where he and his wife, Miss Sadie, came from in the United States, in Indiana. Up until that point, the farthest distance I could imagine was to Nairobi. I’d never been, but I knew people who had.”

Capheus shifted in his chair and chuckled warmly to his tea, his eyes attentively returning to her.

“It wasn’t just how far away the one place was. It was how many places there were to go. On the map, that distance between Kisima and Nairobi, even all of Kenya seemed tiny next to everything else.”

“I remember when even Kisima seemed far away,” Capheus laughed, and Shiro joined him, remembering how interminable the hour-long walk to the Friends’ School there felt on her child’s legs. “You know what’s strange is that now, the distance from here to the village seems much farther than any of these places.”

“Now that you can travel the world by clapping your hands, I’m sure it does!” Shiro fronted as a joke, but just underneath that laugh, she realized what he said was just as true for her. Not all distances could be measured in kilometers.

“Sometimes I cross to the other side of the room and end up in another country by mistake!” He said and they both laughed even harder. The tangled threads in her chest pushed up within her and escaped as tears. She was no more able to untangle them on the outside.

“I have always dreamed of traveling to places like that,” she said, wiping her eyes with her apron as the laughter stilled. “When do I get to meet these new friends of yours?”

“That is a somewhat more complicated question. Several of them have already visited us here, shared tea here at this table.” Capheus gestured with his teacup. Shiro's eyes followed where his hand indicated and she almost expected to see someone sitting on her other side. “But because it is only our mind that travels, other people that we are not connected to cannot see or hear those visiting. You will get to meet one of them very soon, though.”

“Oh, yes. That’s right: Korea. So you have been to Korea, too?”

“Yes, many times, but…” His face fell.

“What?”

“For most of the time I have known her, she has been in prison. She is not there for anything she did wrong, but for what her brother did,” he said. Shiro bit her lip, shook her head and sighed, wishing she could be more surprised. It seemed that some stories did not change no matter how far away you went. “So that is most of what I have seen of Korea. I did get to see a little of Seoul before her arrest, but we were not,” he paused. “I didn’t know her very well yet then.”

“But if she’s in prison, that means,” she said, searching his face as she nervously considered what that meant. “I don’t suppose she’s being released soon, is she?”

“Not officially,” he said. “But we don’t know how much longer she will be safe there. If all goes as planned, she should just be able to walk out the door. And besides, she can take care of herself. She has the spirit of Van Damme in her,” he said with an air of complete confidence.

Shiro saw on his face the optimism she had worked hard to reinforce in him, if only so that one of them would believe it. She herself was not so certain.

Capheus noted the doubt on her face. “She will not be alone in her journey, though. None of us is ever lonely for long now. Sometimes even if we really try to be alone.”

Shiro picked up his teacup and took a sip of the lukewarm milky-sweet tea, rolling it across her tongue. Her mind was a web of questions, each caught up in the others. She felt ready to ask very few of them.

“How long until she arrives?” She asked finally.

“Well, assuming everything goes smoothly, just over a week. Next Friday morning." Shiro looked down into the teacup.

“Just what kind of trouble is it she is trying to escape?” She looked up, wearing a nervous crease in her own forehead. Already, she had begun to feel a certain protectiveness for this woman she had never met, whose name she didn’t even know. Capheus bowed his head and sighed.

“It is also her brother. He can think of no one but himself and is terrified of facing what he has done.”

“And what is it that he has done?” She asked with a sickening feeling.

“It started with money he stole - very large amounts of money - from the company their family runs. It is for that she is in prison. Her father knew about this. They had all agreed to it, but it soon didn’t sit well with him and he started working to bring the truth to light. Not long after, he turned up dead.”

Shiro’s face was ridged with disgust. She would ask how someone could do a thing like that, but that kind of selfishness was a disease she had seen before. She had never been impressed by the things people would sacrifice on the altar of fear, especially when it came to family.

“What must her mother think of this?” Shiro asked, wondering where her role in all this sat.

“Her mother passed when she was a child,” he said and Shiro nodded. She wasn’t sure what kind of woman that mother had been, but the relationships he had described them had a centerlessness that lined up with that kind of loss.

“And you think she will be safer here?” She asked. Her son already talked about this group as if they were family. If the family she was born to wouldn’t step up to be strong for her, Shiro was set on being part of the family that would.

“Her brother has very little strength of his own. All he has is the influence he can buy, and the money won’t last forever. We are working to make sure of that. She will be safe if she can disappear outside of Korea,” he said.

As she considered the risks being undertaken, it suddenly struck her that this woman had chosen to come to Nairobi over any of these other places. Although it had been home for years and she could identify any number of charms the city had to offer, she couldn't say it would be the top of her list if given a choice. But circumstances were not the same as choices. She was very clear on that.

“So, are you all connected to each other or are they simply connected through you?”

“No, we are all connected to one another.”

“And how many of there are you that are connected?”

“We are...eight?” He said, then paused to count off on his hands as if going down a checklist. “Yes, eight.”

“Why would she come here, then? If Korea is no longer safe, why would she not choose America or London or somewhere else?” She asked.

“Ah, well,” his smile oozed warm honey at the floor and he scratched his head, “there are reasons and then there are also reasons.”

“I see,” she said knowingly, her smile a sly joke best kept to herself for now. “You needn’t be so shy about it. You have always been allowed to have a little joy all your own. I have told you this many times." The stones that had filled her heart began to lose their weight and shine with warm light.

He finally turned his head to look her in the eye again and she swore his face glowed like the full moon as he thought about her. It was a variation on a look he’d had since he was a baby, reflecting back warmth and sweetness. There was a quality to it at this moment that she had never seen, though, that went beyond warmth. She wasn’t sure what to make of it yet.

He reclaimed the teacup and drained the last of it. The sun had climbed all the way above the roofs of the houses and his route would be waiting soon. He stood, rinsed his cup and set it with the rest of the dishes to dry.

He returned to the table to kiss her on the side of the head. “I must get going,” he said, and stepped out the front door into the morning.

Shiro went to go get the slim atlas that was one of a very few books she kept. It was almost like a favorite storybook for her that she had been over a hundred times or more. At this point, maps of the world were like notes for the information she had collected over the years about different places, for the stories she’d imagined about what it would be like to visit different places, what she would do there. Today, the rest of the world - and those dreams - felt a little bit closer.


End file.
